Even if you never do anything about this, you’ve benefited from an unjust system. You’re already the winner in a game that was rigged to your advantage from the start. – Jonathan Kozol
Businessmen are not in business to lose customers, and schools do not exist to free their clients from the agencies of mass persuasion. School and media possess a productive monopoly upon the imagination of a child. – Jonathan Kozol
I tell young teachers who are determined to dissent from some of the Draconian aspects of the current orthodoxy that the best form of protection is to be incredibly good at what you do and keep good discipline in class. – Jonathan Kozol
Hypersegregated inner-city schools – in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 – are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today. – Jonathan Kozol
The ‘niche’ effect of charter schools guarantees a swift and vicious deepening of class and racial separation. – Jonathan Kozol
But for the children of the poorest people we’re stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We’re not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child. – Jonathan Kozol
I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: ‘Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn’t know that. Let’s go out and fix it.’ – Jonathan Kozol
The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn’t think of asking. – Jonathan Kozol
At that time, I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace, which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well, if it was painful to read, it was also painful to write. I had pains in my chest for two years while I was writing that book. – Jonathan Kozol
No matter what happens in a child’s home, no matter what other social and economic factors may impede a child, there’s no question in my mind that a first-rate school can transform almost everything. – Jonathan Kozol
Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation’s competitive needs. – Jonathan Kozol
I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It’s blasphemy. – Jonathan Kozol
The first ten, twelve or fifteen years of life are excavated of inherent moral worth in order to accommodate a regimen of basic training for the adult years that many of the poorest children may not even live to know. – Jonathan Kozol
I’d love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I’d love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade. – Jonathan Kozol